In the wake of intensifying heat waves, wildfires and the long-reaching effects of climate change, the Western United States faces challenges to its electrical grid, the vast network of wires, generating stations and transformers that power the economy.

The U.S.-Canada Center on Climate-Resilient Western Interconnected Grid, co-led by the University of Utah, has sought to identify solutions for a mounting crisis that communities are not prepared for should the grid fail.

Bringing together a multitude of stakeholders, including 10 academic institutions, various federal and state agencies, industry leaders and community advocates to speak at the 2024 WIRED Grid Resilience Symposium on Sept. 12-13 at the U.

In the opening address, the new center’s co-directors Masood Parvania of the U and Hamid Zareipour of the University of Calgary, spoke about the challenges presented by extreme weather events. 

“We have wildfires across the border, heat waves, and other problems that are considered extreme weather impacting the grid,” said Parvania, the Roger P. Webb Endowed Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering. “Not only across the [grid] but also expanding beyond that.”

It is a pressing issue for a network that sprawls across 136,000 miles over 16 U.S. states and Canadian provinces, with heat waves rising threefold in the last 50 years, and wildfires burning more than 7 million acres in 2024 alone.

Further compounding this issue is the expansion of new technologies like AI data centers, manufacturing and expanding electrification as the economy moves away from fossil fuels—contributing to an estimated 15 to 20% increase in power demand. With a current peak demand of 168 gigawatts, according to Branden Sudduth, Vice President of Reliability Planning and Performance Analysis at the Western Electricity Coordinating Council, there is growing concern for the availability of energy resources. Weather events, such as storms and heat waves, reduce the overall efficiency and output of renewable resources, including wind and solar, causing what Sudduth describes as a “double squeeze.”

Parvania noted three major trends now occurring that make the grid more prone to failure: more extreme weather; increased load from the proliferation of data centers; and technological shifts in power generation.

“We are reshaping the way the grid has been operating over the past hundred years,” he said.

Extreme heat, for example, imposes two major burdens on the grid. First, such events increase demand as people crank up the air conditioning. Then the high temperatures reduce the efficiency of generation and transmission equipment, so it becomes harder to accommodate that increased electrical load, according to Parvania.

Last week’s conference featured several panels spotlighting key issues:

• Industry challenges
• Policy and regulation
• Future electrical demand and generation
• AI and cyberinfrastructure for modeling future climate scenarios
• Transformative technologies to improve grid resilience
• Community engagement
• Innovation and entrepreneurship

“We are always innovating. Part of our thing mission is to look into what’s coming in the future and try to always be ahead of the future. We are estimating in the next 10 years the grid is going to be in such a dire situation that we can’t supply the load. So what are the technologies we should make today in order to prepare for tomorrow?”

Answering such questions will require assembling and processing vast amounts of data.

“We are working on creating data infrastructure that enables bringing all the data together for the use by the researchers. One of the challenges that we face is that we are dealing with extreme weather events, but when it comes to modeling those, we really don’t have the quality data that we need,” Parvania said. “We need to create the medium that makes those data accessible, to be used very easily by researchers without having the burden of learning of how to use those data.”

The center is enlisting the help of John Horel, professor of atmospheric sciences, whose research group analyzes weather and climate processes in mountainous regions using data gathered by MesoWest from 40 weather stations across the West.

“We are using the data for creating tools specifically for climate resilience of the power grid. Some of our researchers and others across the center will create models of future scenarios and how that would impact the grid in those scenarios,” Parvania said. “Specifically we are looking at how that is impacting the power generation in the future, how that is impacting the equipment health in the future.”

That information will help improve grid operations and planning for the future. But accomplishing climate resilience for the grid will require collaborations among academic disciplines, with researcher working closely with industry players, Parvania stressed.

• Brian Maffly Science writer, University of Utah Communications
  801-573-2382 brian.maffly@utah.edu